The move comes as wealth managers continue to wrestle with rising compliance and other tasks, using technology to ease some of the grunt work.

Dynasty Financial Partners and consultancy MarketCounsel have inked a strategic partnership with SmartRIA, a firm that automates how RIAs comply with regulations - a timely alliance when red tape continues to grow.

Under the arrangement, Dynasty will make available The SmartRIA Pro™ platform for its network advisors; MarketCounsel will use it to deliver its tailored compliance management program to its member firms. 

Both firms have also completed an undisclosed investment in SmartRIA. As part of the arrangement, the businesses have selected MarketCounsel’s president and chief executive, Brian Hamburger, to join SmartRIA’s board of directors, they said in a statement yesterday.

“When we were looking for cutting-edge software to make compliance considerably easier, more operationally efficient, and more collaborative for advisory organizations, we found that SmartRIA was the best choice,” Edward C Swenson, co-founder and chief operating officer of Dynasty Financial Partners, said.

For years the financial services industry around the world has been using technology to try to reduce the drudgery and cost of obeying rules, turning compliance from a cost into a potential differentiator. An example of this is the rise of firms specializing in helping wealth managers onboard clients, such as Switzerland’s Appway, which announced yesterday that it was being acquired by UK-based FNZ for an undisclosed sum.

“As the regulatory and risk landscape continues to evolve, RIAs find themselves allocating outsized internal resources to protect the firm and maintain their regulatory compliance program,” Hamburger. 

“At Dynasty, we utilize our industry-leading size and scale in the technology and value-add business services space to make strategic investments or acquisitions where we view synergies for our network. SmartRIA fits the bill because it presents RIAs with the opportunity to train their advisors and obtain firm-wide consistency on workflows for a wide gamut of compliance issues,” Shirl Penney, CEO of Dynasty Financial Partners, said. 

The SmartRIA Pro platform handles tasks for monitoring trade; documenting operations and records; streamlining workflows; and allows firms to map vendor and employee access to sensitive data.

Data Governance: Firms can map vendor and employee access to sensitive data, conduct vendor due diligence, and document data exposure incidents within the platform, allowing them to track, document, and report on their entire data governance program.